Spirit in the Dark

It turns out the horrors that took place on Sept. 11 weren’t so unthinkable after all. Until the morning the earth stood still, agit-rappers The Coup planned on putting a computer-generated photo of the World Trade Center towers blowing up on the cover of their CD The Party. Bob Dylan seems to have seen it coming too. “When I left my home the sky split open wide,” he gasps on “Love and Theft,” his latest album. Dylan’s record hit stores Sept. 11, and from dread-filled portents like “Some things are just too terrible to be true” to “The road’s washed out / Weather not fit for man or beast,” it contains more apocalyptic pronouncements than “Masters of War,” “All Along the Watchtower” and “Slow Train Coming” combined.

Yet this prescience, uncanny as it might seem, isn’t what made “Love and Theft” and The Party the two best, and timeliest, albums of 2001. What gave these records their power was both artists’ ability to envision alternatives to the oppression that was already terrorizing our world, both at home and abroad: Dylan through a solidarity born of suffering, The Coup by turning the party out and the system upside down. Just imagining a world free of tyranny is an act of resistance. But conveying that promise in rhyme, and through beats and grooves that rock the body/body-politic electric, constitutes an out-and-out coup, a victory of tropes over troops, of samplers over suicide bombers.

Such were the only sorts of musical triumphs that resonated much with me after Sept. 11. Chief among the others were the transcendental feminism of singer-MC Mystic, the lesbionic anthems and roller-skate jams of electro-dissidents Le Tigre, the Curtis- and Marvin-inspired positivity of soul sister Angie Stone, and the ongoing witness to beauty amid brokenness of chamber-punk Alejandro Escovedo.

Expressions of empathy, records that opened outward, had a similar ring of truth: Buddy and Julie Miller’s by turns bluesy and twangy testimony to the indestructibility of the human spirit; the Ass Ponys’ guitar-charged mash notes to their fellow misfits; country singers Patty Loveless and Rodney Crowell drinking deeply of their bittersweet family wellsprings and forcing us to wade in the waters of our own. Beacons by Go-Go pioneer Chuck Brown, raptivist Michael Franti, Rabelaisian song-poet Eric Taylor, indie rappers Aesop Rock and Cannibal Ox, and singer of new-fashioned heart songs Maura O’Connell all vied for space on my shortlist as well.

By contrast, a few worthy records I heard prior to Sept. 11 that might otherwise have been contenders for my Top 10 shrunk in importance: Lucinda Williams’ studies in brown (too shuttered and obsessive); Macy Gray’s id orgy (too put on); Gillian Welch’s signifying set pieces (too detached). And it was hard to give a shit about which secondhand buzz band—The Strokes, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or the White Stripes—was, please, gonna save rock from itself. (At least the Stripes mine the blues, as potent a means of self-affirmation in the face of adversity as there is.)

The one voice that’s held out the most hope for me during these past two months of blanket interviews and carpet bombings, though, emanated from a loop on The May Street Project, the dance-pop debut of 23-year-old Texas expatriate Shea Seger. It wasn’t Seger’s willowy alto either, but rather the craggy voice of a Southern elder rising up, like a prayer, imploring, “You’ve got to go ’cross the bridge and talk to your neighbor.” Fittingly, the song is called “Shatterwall,” and while its sentiment is simple enough, it is nevertheless the most prophetic thing I’ve heard all year. More than just a prescription for healing, its unadorned plea for community offers the only real solution for preventing the unthinkable from ever happening again.

Top 10

1. The Coup,The Party (75 Ark) The post-G-Funk grooves of this Oakland duo (Boots Riley on the mic, Pam the Funkstress on the wheels of steel) more than make good on their claim to be “proletarian, funkadelic parliamentarians.” So do their politics, the title here alluding to Karl Marx, Bobby Seale and raising the rent. More revolutionary yet is Riley’s womanist streak: “You as a woman gotta know yo’ place / That’s in the front, baby,” he exhorts his daughter. Now, those are family values I can get behind.

2. Bob Dylan,“Love and Theft” (Columbia) This is high-minded larceny at its best; its filchings of everyone from Dock Boggs and Bing Crosby to the Beach Boys and Blind Willies Johnson and McTell are as impish and profuse as the dazzling panoply of samples on the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. Even more disarming, though, is how our hero takes us down in the flood not just so we know how it feels, but to show us a direction home.

3. Buddy and Julie Miller (HighTone) When these alt-country sweethearts testify that their love could hold up the sky when hard rains fall, it’s neither sappy nor narcissistic, it’s prophetic: a conviction born of their faith that the love that radiates from each of us—no mere feeling, but an ontological force—can heal and transform the world.